Superheroes and Origin Stories: Tools to Discover and Claim One's Callings
Intersections No. 41 · Spring 2015
Clark Kent: “How can I decide what to do with my life when I don’t even know who I am? I feel like I’m walking in a dream, and nothing’s real, not even me.”
Jonathan Clark: “Then maybe the answer is to wake up. There will come a day Clark, when for the very first time, you won’t have to hold back…a day when you can cut loose…a day when you can finally be who you truly are… you’re unique in all the world. Extraordinary. Not just any man…and more than just a man…a SUPER-man. Live Clark. Follow your passion. Show the whole world what you can do. Fly, Clark… Fly…”
From Superman: Earth One, by J. Michael Straczynski and Shane Davis
Origin stories—the stories of heroes coming to be—are fascinating. This is why we tend to get caught up in them. I can’t tell you the number of times I have read or seen the origin of Superman. I never get sick of it, and apparently, neither do others, as the story gets told over and over again. Origin stories define characters: where they came from, who they were, what they’ve faced, and how they have discovered themselves, their strengths, and their calling. We know many characters within literature and film, but until we know their origin, we do not know their purpose in the world. I am convinced that discovering one’s origin and referring to the stories of our fictional heroes can be powerful tools in helping individuals discover and claim their callings.
Joseph Campbell identified a “monomyth”—a single story—that can be observed within many forms of literature and film. As writers and filmmakers continued studying the pattern, they later referred to it as “The Hero’s Journey.” Although the pattern has been debated and modified throughout the years, many agree that it consists of 12 stages: the ordinary world; the call to adventure; refusal of the call; meeting with the mentor; crossing the threshold; tests, allies, and enemies; approach; the ordeal; the reward; the road back; the resurrection; and the return with the elixir. These stages can serve as a catalyst for helping individuals understand their own origins.
For example, in my own journey (where I’m the hero—which is fantastic, I must say), identifying my ordinary world consisted of being a young Iowa boy who believed he was meant to impact the world in some way, but was also unsure of who he was and how he could contribute. Then, my freshman year of high school, I attended a youth leadership conference called Get a Grip where I met my mentor. By experiencing this leadership organization, I discovered that my way of impacting the world was by encouraging people, making them laugh, and helping them realize their true potential. After a few years of being mentored and continuing to discover myself, I crossed the threshold by attending college.
This is just one way we can take a look at our own origin stories. By walking through “The Hero’s Journey” stages, we can start to pinpoint significant moments in our lives that have shaped us and that demonstrate what we are good at. This method of reflection can lead to other questions, such as: “Does your origin story decide your vocation?” For example, does coming from a family of medical professionals mean you cannot pursue an art degree? The concept itself can at least start the discussion on a level that people understand and relate to.
As I have worked in higher education, I’ve noticed that we tend to make things incredibly complex as we work with students. Although college is a time for rigorous exploration and discovery, we need to find opportunities to meet students at their level and relate what we are trying to teach with their experiences and interests. Once we have their attention, the rigorous exploration and discovery can commence.
When an individual walks into my office, his or her attention is immediately drawn to my Superman and other hero collectibles displayed there. These items generate discussion. Students, faculty, and staff ask, “Why Superman?” My response is always, “Because he humbly seeks to do good in the world using the many talents that he possesses.” And to the general question of, “Why superheroes?”, I say, “Because I believe we are all superheroes in our own way. The hero’s journey lives within all of us.”
Heroes—however we define them—speak to all of us. Whether they are fictional (Superman, Wonder Woman, Harry Potter) or real (Rosa Parks, Ghandi, Mother Theresa), they speak. Why do they speak to all of us? We can relate to their failures, hardships, and struggles. We can also relate to their successes, the moments at which they overcame adversity or some villainous foe. Heroes inspire us to do and be something more—to pursue our calling. We must find ways to help others become the hero in their own lives.
As higher education professionals, we have an opportunity to mentor students along their own journeys—as Professor Charles Xavier does with the X-Men. We get to challenge, support, and encourage students to focus on their strengths and manage their weaknesses so that when their true purpose does call, they can, as Jonathan Kent says, “fly.”
As you work with students, find stories of heroes that speak to you—superheroes, friends, family members, politicians, social justice leaders, and so forth. Use these role models, mentors, and leaders to help others realize who they are and how they can contribute to society. As you provide these examples, help others articulate their origin stories so they might find their purpose in the world and “wake up” to take their call.
Works Cited
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949.
Straczynski, J. Michael (author) and Shane Davis (illustrator). Superman: Earth One, volume 1. New York: DC Comics, 2010.
-
Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm celebrates the leadership of ELCA colleges and universities within American higher education — from presidential service in major higher-education agencies to recognized leadership in global education and interfaith understanding — and lifts up the health of the ELCA network of schools as a church-related community that maintains shared identity while living as good citizens of the larger academy.
-
Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn introduces the “Called to Leadership” issue by worrying that training for leadership has become so ubiquitous in higher education as to be nearly meaningless, and recovers Luther’s sense of leadership as service — a calling to be a “slave” whose learning, power, and wisdom belong to the unlearned, the oppressed, and the foolish — as the shared mission of Lutheran colleges to train servant-leaders.
-
Article
Vocational Leadership
Darrell Jodock
Jodock proposes “vocational leadership” as a name for a distinctive educational value at the heart of a Lutheran college — one that seeks to benefit the neighbor and the community, inspires and invites others to participate in that service, and is institutionally anchored in the Lutheran concept of vocation. He unpacks twelve facets of vocational leadership and ties them to Luther’s own leadership around indulgences, public schooling, and beggary.
-
Article
Sharing Leadership within Colleges and Universities
Leanne Neilson
Building on Jodock’s framework, Neilson applies vocational leadership to the unique work environment of higher education — mission statements, faculty governance, the slow pace of consensus, and the sometimes uneasy relationships between faculty and staff — and asks how leaders, followers, and team players can create an atmosphere of mutual empowerment on Lutheran college campuses.
-
Article
Mentoring in the Academy: Of Gurus, Coaches, and Sponsors
Faith Wambura Ngunjiri
Ngunjiri urges faculty, staff, and administrators in faith-based institutions to assemble a “personal board of directors” of mentors — connectors, sponsors, taskmasters, motivators, dreamers, sages, and proofers — and reflects on how race and gender complicate mentoring in predominantly white, male-led ELCA institutions, where women and minorities must reach out to build the “cloud of witnesses” they need to thrive.
-
Article
The Dangers of "Vocation" for Students Thinking about Career
Carl Hughes
Hughes warns that Lutherans too often use “vocation” as a theologically glorified synonym for a fulfilling career — a misuse that constricts God’s call to our jobs and excludes minimum-wage workers, caregivers, and others from the dignity of calling. Recovering Luther’s expansive understanding, he argues that vocation refers first to people, not professions, and must always be bigger than any one aspect of our lives.
-
Article
Women in Leadership: Obstacles, Opportunities, and Entry Points
Susan Hasseler
Drawing on two focus-group conversations with female faculty and academic administrators at Augustana College (Sioux Falls), Hasseler traces four obstacle/opportunity themes for women in academic leadership — valuing the intellectual work of leadership, religious and cultural interpretations of gender roles, caregiving realities, and embracing a strong voice — and proposes deliberate next steps for cultivating inclusive excellence on ELCA campuses.
-
Article
Leading from Within: Peer-Learning Consultations to Explore Our Callings and Campus Capacities for Leadership
Chris Johnson
Johnson reframes vocational leadership as “soul work” that calls for the deep mind as much as the conscious one, and offers two practices — deep listening and a modified Quaker clearness consultation — as ways for campus colleagues to listen one another into existence. Drawing on Sharon Daloz Parks, Marshall Ganz, Parker Palmer, and Mary Rose O’Reilley, he invites readers to map their stories of self, us, and now.
-
Book Review
Old and New Ideas of the Liberal Arts: A Review of Claiming Our Callings
David Crowe, Katie Hanson
Crowe and Hanson review Claiming Our Callings: Toward a New Understanding of Vocation in the Liberal Arts (Oxford 2014), a collection of thirteen essays by St. Olaf faculty edited by Kaethe Schwehn and L. DeAne Lagerquist. They commend the book’s thoughtful, sincere engagement with consumerism, sustainability, Buddhist meditation, and Lutheran-Bonhoefferian theology — and recommend it for any liberal arts campus pulled between idealistic mission and career-minded pressure.
-
Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 47 · Spring 2018
Wilhelm celebrates that NECU schools continue to educate for vocation but warns that the culture of Lutheran higher education is at risk — sustained largely by informal cadres of individuals — and introduces NECU’s Rooted and Open statement as a first institutional step toward reclaiming the 500-year-old Lutheran intellectual and educational tradition.
-
Article
Students in the Cloud: Creating Digital Citizens
Jose Marichal
No. 29 · Spring 2009
Marichal weighs the utopian and dystopian views of the “networked information economy,” drawing on Yochai Benkler, Manuel Castells, Henry Jenkins, Cass Sunstein, Robert Putnam, Nicholas Carr, and Andrew Keen to chart the promise and peril of life “in the cloud,” and proposes Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of phronesis—developed through Hubert Dreyfus’s five stages of skill acquisition—as the goal of digital citizenship for college faculty and their students.
-
Article
The Duty to Teach and Restore Bodily Autonomy: Reflections from the Classroom
Cynthia Richards
No. 57 · Spring 2023
Richards reflects on a Narrative Medicine course she taught at Wittenberg University in the wake of the Dobbs decision, in which students examined cultural “first recognitions” of the reproductive body and discovered that almost none had ever had a way of talking openly about their reproductive selves — an alienation she calls educators to address.
-
Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
No. 26 · Fall 2007
Haak introduces the issue with the question of whether “our Lutheranism” should have any discernible effect on how we operate as Lutheran colleges, and proposes a working list of “Lutheran” values that characterize our institutions — complexity, real evil, suffering as part of human experience, the centrality of discourse, transcendent values, attention to place, institutional self-criticism, and unity over division — inviting campuses to extend the conversation begun by Simmons, O’Hara, and the Wartburg colleagues.
-
Article
The Lutheran Theological Tradition and Recruiting Lutheran Students
Ernest L. Simmons
No. 13 · Winter 2002
Simmons opens with an Abraham-and-Isaac “Windows 98” joke to illustrate the dialectic of faith and learning, then argues that in a new market era of limited religious background, intentional mission and marketing go together. Drawing on Levine and Cureton’s When Hope and Fear Collide for the Millennial Generation born in 1982 and Tom Beaudoin’s Virtual Faith for their GenX parents, he reads “Reclaiming Lutheran Students” survey results showing 86% strong community at ELCA colleges versus 54% at flagship publics and 61% alumni mentoring versus 39%. He then develops three areas where the Lutheran tradition uniquely equips its colleges—community, mentoring and vocation, and the integration of faith and values—using Luther’s “two kingdoms” image of the “Left Hand” (reason) and “Right Hand” (faith) of God, with academic freedom as a product of Ahlstrom’s “Critical Current” in the tradition, and closes with three challenges: recruiting and retaining mentoring faculty, educating church leaders, and reaching potential students and parents.
-
Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 16 · Winter 2003
Selbyg reports that “vocation” is surely among the top three words in Intersections’s history and congratulates nine ELCA institutions—Augsburg, Augustana (Rock Island), Concordia (Moorhead), Gustavus Adolphus, Luther, Pacific Lutheran, St. Olaf, Valparaiso, and Wartburg—on receiving roughly two-million-dollar Lilly Endowment grants for the “Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation,” while reminding readers that for Lutherans the priesthood of all believers means callings to be accountants, nurses, police officers, and home makers count as fully as callings into ministry.